Israel Matzav

Hard facts

Ehud Yaari, formerly Israel Radio's chief Arab correspondent, is a straight shooter. In this piece in last week's Jerusalem Report, placed on the JPost web page, he evaluates where we stand on each front. It makes Condi Rice's Annapolis conference mugging almost look irrelevant.

Gaza: Over the coming year, there is no doubt that Hamas, in its upgraded military mode, will be producing Qassam-type missiles with a range of 20-25 kms, bringing all of Ashkelon, Kiryat Gat, Netivot, Ofakim and the many kibbutzim and moshavim that surround them into the line of fire. Over a quarter of a million Israelis will be in range. Moreover, Hamas will be able to fire the rockets from the heart of Gaza, without having to send launch teams to the open areas close to the border fence.

All of which means that unless there's a miracle and a full and stable cease-fire is in place, the government, whether eagerly or out of a lack of any alternative, will have to order the army to carry out a major operation to clean up the Strip, along the lines of the dazzingly successful Operation Defensive Wall in the West Bank in 2002. It will probably be harder and cost more casualties. The army is already preparing for the campaign and Hamas is working feverishly on its defense plans, based mainly on heavy rocket fire into Israel - dozens a day - and fortifications and trenches around the launch sites.

The West Bank: The Palestinian security apparatuses are not in control of the whole area. If it were not for Israel's regular preemptive counterterror raids, Hamas could, if it so wished and even without the use of armed force, paralyze the functioning of the Palestinian Authority. There's no chance that things will change in the foreseeable future. The Fatah movement has in fact ceased to exist, although there are still tens of thousands of card-carrying members. There is no meaningful process of resuscitation or reform under way in either the PA, or its ruling party, Fatah. In private conversations, associates of the PA chairman, Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen), call him "a pensioner still going to the office." For example, the Al-Amari refugee camp in the heart of Ramallah, the "capital" of the PA, has openly declared itself beyond the jurisdiction of the Palestinian police.

When British intelligence operatives asked leading members of the Fatah's Al-Aqsa Brigades in Nablus who their enemies were, they replied: Hamas, corruption, collaborators with Israel, and Israel itself, in that order. The militiamen, in other words, see the rotten government of Abu Mazen as more of a target than the settlers. Instead of gaining strength after the debacle in Gaza, Fatah on the West Bank is growing weaker.

The Annapolis Conference: Abu Mazen has been heard joking with his bureau staff that "after 20 years, I've gone back to being a teacher." What he means is that he finds himself engaged in long hours of explaining to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the land mines on the way to a permanent settlement. The Egyptians have already advised finding a suitable pretext to postpone the parley indefinitely. Meanwhile, it is becoming clear to all parties to the negotiations that there is no chance of agreement on a declaration that will herald even a hint of a breakthrough. If Abu Mazen compromises, he will be assailed by both Hamas and much of Fatah. If a vague statement is issued, everyone will say yet again that he has nothing to offer to his people.

The Palestinians are fuming at Rice for having trapped them in a corner and have begun to try and get out of it by renewing the talk about a "third step" in the Oslo process that was never implemented. What this means is an attempt to get more territory on the West Bank from Israel without having to reach any substantive
agreement.

Lebanon: Without knowing how the grave internal crisis in this country will end, these facts are already clear: Hizballah is building a large quasi-divisional formation north of the Litani River, as part of an effort to link the Shi'ites of South Lebanon to the Shi'ite heartland in the Beka Valley, through a corridor across the Christian and Druse villages that separate the two. Syria and Iran are supplying the militia with long-range rockets, anti-tank missiles and other advanced materiel that it never had in the July 2006 war. In the area controlled by UNIFIL south of the Litani, Hizballah is also building its "nature reserves" or rocket-launching bases and underground bunkers in the mountains, quietly but unhindered, and reorganizing, on a larger scale, its deployment in the Shi'ite villages near the Israeli border. The U.N. force is simply not effective in preventing this.

Evaluations of Syria and Iran follow.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:01 PM